The Influence of Cue Duration on Item-Method Directed Forgetting: A Selective Retrieval Interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We tested the assumptions of a prominent and longstanding account of item-method directed forgetting: the selective rehearsal account. We manipulated the time available for rehearsal, to clarify the mechanisms underlying memory performance during an intent to remember versus forget. In the item-method directed forgetting paradigm, each presented item receives its own instructional cue during the study phase—either to-be-forgotten (F) or to-be-remembered (R). The typical finding during the test phase is that memory is poorer for F items than for R items. Four experiments investigated the influence of instructional cue durations of 1, 5, and 10 seconds. Experiments 1a and 1b, with the order of cue durations randomized, showed no effect of cue duration on recognition of either R or F single words. Experiment 2, using unrelated word pairs, we again showed no effect of cue duration on associative recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 blocked cue duration and showed equivalently an increase in the recognition of both R and F single words and word pairs with increasing cue duration. We suggest that the consistently better memory for R items than for F items across cue duration depends on (1) a rapid retrieval check engaged for R items only and (2) a rapid removal process implemented for F items only. Additionally, any post-cue rehearsal is carried out only when cue duration is predictable, and is equally likely for F items and R items.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".